Phoenix Blood (Old School Book 1)

by Jenny Schwartz

  Marcus strolled forward. His quiet stride had all the ominous power of a gunslinger walking into town or a lion on the prowl. He seated Sadie on the sofa opposite the one his mom grasped.

  Karma fluttered onto the back of the sofa, perching between Sadie and Marcus.

  His parents swiveled to face them. Winona opened her mouth and closed it with whatever she’d intended to say, unsaid. Paul squeezed her shoulders, then led her around to sit opposite their son.

  An antique walnut coffee table and years of betrayal filled the space between the two couples.

  Winona and Paul held hands. Although she dressed like a mid-level secretary and he wore the expensive casual clothes of a company president, the clothes and their mismatch clearly didn’t matter to Paul. He had an edgy energy, happy, but unsure that his happiness would last. He’d glance at Winona, smile, then lose his smile as he looked nervously at Marcus. Paul was a man whose life had turned upside down. With the Senator dead, he had a chance at the life he’d never had, including a second chance with Winona, whom he’d apparently never forgotten nor ceased loving.

  Marcus studied his parents. “The Senator’s death changed many things. I’m more interested in why Winona left.”

  “Your grandfather.” Winona bit her lip. She made a gesture of distress with one hand, and light sparkled from a large diamond. The expensive engagement ring and wedding band squeezed the flesh of her ring finger. Evidently, Paul had saved her rings after her “death” and he’d returned them to her. She needed to have them resized. “I’ve thought of what I’d say for so long…and now, Marcus, you are so handsome.” She looked at him with love and yearning, hungrily; with mother-love long starved.

  He looked back at her without expression.

  She flinched.

  Sadie stayed as still as a mouse. The emotions in the room were electric, except from Marcus who was completely locked down. She hoped the burn of blood in his veins wouldn’t flare. She wished she could take it from him. She wished there was something she could do to help him.

  Winona cleared her throat. “My family has a little magic. Sometimes we have second sight or a touch of healing. I don’t have any magic, but there is a family story that one of my ancestors was a shaman. When Paul and I married.” She smiled faintly at him. “Chester despised the source of my inherited family wealth, and he despised me. Paul and I were happy that Chester ignored us and Marcus. We were happy,” she said emphatically, staring at her son.

  If she hoped for a response from him, she didn’t get it. Her eyes sought Paul’s. “I’ve had so much time to think of the situation. Chester was always interested in power and magic, even if he hid the latter interest. You had to know something of magic yourself to recognize the nature of the objects he collected. When his wife died it changed something in him.”

  Paul’s shoulders jerked. “He never loved Mother. He ignored her and she drank herself to death.”

  Wow. Sadie felt the impact of the multi-generational emotional trauma in the room, but Marcus’s hand grew no warmer against hers. Maybe she was wrong that his magic burned in his blood from emotion.

  Then she caught a glimpse of something moving on the floor. No, in the floor. The rose and tan veins running through the cream marble were shifting. She’d bet anything that Marcus was directing his telekinetic magic into the floor.

  He was manipulating the composition of the marble to form a pattern beneath the walnut coffee table. He was forcing the accumulating magic in his body into a harmless activity.

  She hoped it would work.

  Winona frowned at Paul. “Chester mightn’t have cared about your mother for herself, but her death reminded him of his own mortality. He became more ruthless, more…unstable.”

  “So you decided to get out?” Sadie hadn’t meant to say the combative words aloud, but once they’d escaped, she felt no need to apologize. Winona had saved herself and left her son in reach of a monster.

  “I consulted a psychic.” Winona met Sadie’s accusing gaze. She raised her chin. “The woman gave me a standard reading. She came to my house. Then Marcus came home from school. Rita, our housekeeper, collected him. The psychic saw Marcus race in, hug me, and head for the kitchen and food. She stared after him with the strangest expression on her face and said, ‘One day, his grandfather will force him to kill you.’ She said it simply, as if it was inevitable.” Winona’s hands twisted, fighting against Paul’s reassuring clasp. “She wouldn’t take my money. She apologized! Then she ran.” Winona inhaled sharply. “And I made my own plans to run. I couldn’t let Chester destroy Marcus. I couldn’t let the prophecy come true.”

  Paul hugged Winona against his side. “You did the right thing. The Senator tortured me to control Marcus. He would have killed you.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Marcus said fiercely.

  Sadie felt his pain and her own anger exploded. “Don’t you dare say that of Marcus! Don’t you dare. The things he did, he did to keep you safe. He—ouch!”

  Karma had tugged a beakful of Sadie’s hair.

  Paul’s face sagged. His shoulders slumped with shame. “I didn’t mean Marcus would have killed Winona. I meant my father would have. Marcus, I…you’re a stronger man than me. You survived the Senator.”

  “Yes. I survived.” Marcus put an arm around Sadie’s waist and hauled her back from the edge of the sofa.

  She folded her arms and fumed.

  “Was it bad?” Winona asked tentatively.

  “How do you quantify hell?” Marcus wasn’t attacking, but he wasn’t sugarcoating things either.

  “I couldn’t take you with me.” Winona’s voice shook. “Chester didn’t care about me. When I faked my car accident, going over the bridge with my body lost, I knew he wouldn’t look for me. But he would have looked for his grandson, for the last of his blood. I had to get away so that the prophecy couldn’t come true. Before I left, I took you to a witch, Marcus.”

  “The woman in the trailer park,” he said slowly.

  Winona nodded. “She was powerful and she was returning to Peru. I didn’t think Chester would ever find out about her, and I was right. I paid her with a diamond necklace. It was fortuitous. It was the one I’d thought I’d lost the year before.”

  “The one we hadn’t insured?” Paul asked.

  “I found it in a vase. I can’t even remember why I put it there. It felt like fate, like a blessing, a promise that I was doing the right thing. I took you to the witch, Marcus, and she could sense your magic. She said you would be able to move things with your mind. Paul says you’re a telekinetic.”

  Sadie, held tight against Marcus, could feel his body heating. It wasn’t as hot as her temper. “So, knowing that Marcus had magic and that his grandfather was mad for magic, you left him with the Senator?”

  “No! Well, yes, but the witch…she set a powerful spell. She said it would block Marcus’s magic. That it would be as if he had none. It did work.” Winona was pleading with Marcus. “Paul said you didn’t show any magic till nine years ago. Magic normally reveals itself at puberty. The witch’s spell worked. Something must have broken it.”

  Nine years ago, a witch’s spell broke. Nine years ago. Sadie tried to pull away from Marcus, but he kept her clamped to him.

  “Don’t go there,” he warned.

  Witches’ magic was of the natural world, of blood and bodies, and of passion.

  Sadie stared at him in guilt and shock. “It was having sex with me. My magic touched yours. The spell just evaporated, wore out, whatever. I did this to you!”

  “No, Sadie.” His hands burned against her skin. He swore and leapt up, pacing away, even though she hadn’t flinched.

  “You have magic?” Winona asked her.

  Paul shook his head. “I didn’t recognize you. You were the girl with Marcus…” Realization dawned in his pale blue eyes. He stared at his son’s rigid figure, his back to them as Marcus stared out a window. “The girl Marcus sent away…out of the Senator’s reach. He
kept you safe.”

  “Like I did,” Winona said.

  “No!” Sadie jumped up. “Not like you. You escaped. He stayed and suffered. He kept everyone else safe from the Senator at the price of his own life. Paul, did the Senator torture you again after that first day?”

  “No.”

  “No,” Sadie echoed, judgment and condemnation in her voice. “Because Marcus obeyed him. And the Senator didn’t go looking for me as a possible weapon to hold over Marcus’s head because Marcus obeyed him, and so, the Senator forgot about me.” She glared at Winona. “Congratulations. You prevented your prophecy coming true. Too bad you didn’t save your son.”

  “What else could I have done?” Color flooded Winona’s face. Rage, and possibly guilt, thinned her lips.

  “You should have killed the Senator,” Sadie said.

  The room stopped.

  Even Marcus turned from the window to stare at her.

  She stared back. “Didn’t he deserve to die?”

  “Yes.” Marcus walked to her.

  She touched his fingers, feeling how they scorched her. He was burning up, the fever in his blood reaching a critical point. They had to leave, now. She looked at Winona. “In your shoes, I wouldn’t have hired a witch to constrain my son. I’d have hired a killer to send the devil to hell.”

  On that note, they walked out, with Karma flying to them.

  Marcus passed the truck key to Sadie. “Drive to the river. I’ll transform into the griffin and follow you.”

  Sadie was trembling so hard from emotional overload that she wasn’t safe to drive, but Marcus needed to transform even more. The level of heat in his body had to be nigh on unendurable. It would kill him.

  She hurried to start the truck. Karma stayed outside of it with Marcus. They were parked on the street. As Sadie pulled into the peak hour traffic, Marcus transformed into a griffin and took to the sky. The smaller dot that flew with him was Karma.

  His mother had believed he’d kill her.

  His dad seemed prepared to love and forgive Winona for staging her own death, for abandoning their son and vanishing for twenty four years. She’d been gone for half her life, and nearly all of Marcus’s. Did she have another family? What had she done in those intervening years?

  More importantly, how do I help Marcus?

  Sadie finally escaped the congested traffic and reached an empty stretch of river. She stopped the truck jerkily and got out clothes for him. When she turned with them in her hand, he’d landed. Reality shivered a moment as he shifted back to human. She held out the clothes.

  “Thanks.” He dressed.

  Well, he got half-dressed. When he’d gotten his jeans on, she hugged him. His chest was warm, but it was a normal human warmth.

  He ran his hand up and down her back.

  “Are you okay?” she whispered. “How can I help?”

  He didn’t answer, just kept holding her—perhaps that was his answer. She relaxed against him till he kissed her briefly and stepped back to pull on his shirt. “Before I transformed into a griffin, that first time, I was telling you about the Arena and that I’d killed people. You recoiled.”

  She watched him button his shirt.

  He watched her face. He finished buttoning his shirt, but still didn’t speak.

  “What would you rather I had done?” She shoved her thumbs into the back pockets of her jeans. “Would you rather I’d been turned on by the information.”

  “No. But just now, you said you’d have killed the Senator. You sounded as if you meant it.”

  “I did.” She tugged at her jeans pockets, agitated. “It can’t have been one prophecy on its own that freaked your mom. Winona consulted a psychic because she was already worried about the Senator’s behavior. She felt threatened. If that had all added up to an imminent threat to my son…”

  “You’d kill to protect your child.” Marcus slid his hands down her arms and interlaced his fingers with hers. Approval rumbled in his voice.

  “Or I’d arrange to have a person killed.” She felt cold to her soul. “I hadn’t realized I had that potential for violence in me until today. I mean, theoretically, we all know there are some crimes so vile that if you caught someone in the middle of one and you had a gun…but to hire a killer, is different.”

  “It wouldn’t have been so easy to hire a killer willing to take out the Senator. He was well-connected.”

  She smiled bleakly. “That’s where I’m luckier than your mom. I have friends.” And I never realized till now what it costs Olga to make the decisions she does, Sadie concluded silently.

  “You’ve mentioned your friends before. I hadn’t realized they were deadly.”

  “Most of us aren’t.” She thought of self-defense classes at Minervalle School. “But we can all protect ourselves—from ordinary threats,” she added as she remembered the Stag mercenaries who wanted the amulet that hung around her neck.

  “Let’s find a motel, then have dinner, and you can tell me about your friends. I had no idea they were so interesting.”

  If Marcus wanted a distraction from his family reunion, she was willing to provide one. Plus, she rarely had a chance to talk honestly about the Old School. “You’re on.”

  Chapter 9

  Marcus ate steak and baked potatoes smothered in sour cream, while Sadie picked at a Caesar salad and talked about the boarding school she’d attended in England. The longer she talked, the happier she seemed. She obviously had good memories and good friends. The school itself, though, shocked the socks off him.

  He pointed his fork at her, manners forgotten. “When we met, you told me that your great-aunt had attended Minervalle School and you’d gotten a scholarship as her relative.”

  Sadie grimaced apologetically. “I hated the lie, but there had to be some explanation of how a country girl from North Carolina ended up at an exclusive English boarding school.”

  “What really happened?”

  She chewed and swallowed a crunchy lettuce leaf before chasing a piece of bacon with her fork. “The bursar at the school is a finder talent like me. We’re rare, so she keeps my talent on her list of talents to find. When she finds a girl with a talent the school specializes in developing, she investigates, and if the situation is promising, the school contacts the family. I was ten. Dad had just remarried and I was unhappy and having trouble settling in with my new stepmom and stepsisters. Boarding school in England was a heavensent escape. And then, once there, I was introduced to magic.” She smiled.

  Marcus wished his introduction to magic had been even a third as happy. But, moving on. “You said not everyone at the school had magic.”

  “Absolutely. It was never a big deal. Minervalle School makes a point of recruiting internationally and across powers. It was about building a network all the Old School girls can call on and contribute to. All of us, together, working quietly to improve the world. Some of us have magic. Others have intelligence, charm, money, determination. Different character traits and talents.” She paused, her gaze reflective, before she smiled at him. “The biggest strength is knowing that we can rely on one another.”

  “Allies.” He got it. Being able to trust another person was a luxury he’d never had, not since he’d pushed Sadie away nine years ago. That sort of support gave you courage and options. “Are you often in danger, helping your friends?”

  “No.” She shook her head for emphasis. “Oh, you mean the Stag mercenaries. No, this hasn’t happened before. I don’t normally do acquisitions. I find things and then other Old School members handle going after them. I thought the amulet would be a small thing. Then I met Millie Tremblay, the Stag mercenaries burned down her home, and the whole thing went to heck. Till I met you.”

  He pushed away his plate, disconcerted by the warmth in her eyes. “You can’t consider meeting me to be a good thing. I kept you safe, but beyond that—”

  “I never forgot you, Marcus. I tried dating other guys. Nine years. I wanted a relationship, children.
Love and hate.” She flipped her hand over and back, gesturing that they were two sides of the same coin. “I hated you too much to love another man.”

  “I hurt you so much you didn’t dare trust another man.”

  “That, too.” Incredibly, she smiled and finished her salad.

  He drummed his fingers on the table. “And now what? I’m still dying. Will you forget me and fall in love with someone else?”

  She considered him thoughtfully. “I think the easier solution would be for you not to die.”

  He sighed, feeling tired down to his toes. Feeling lost and wanting to howl like a wolf at the sight of the wistful hope in her hazel eyes. “That would take a miracle beyond magic.”

  “Then I need to find a miracle.”

  “Did you enjoy your meals? Would you like dessert?” Their waitress interrupted them.

  “No, thank you.”

  At Sadie’s refusal, he paid and they left. He couldn’t resist touching her lower back lightly as he held the door for her and she walked through. It was the kind of gesture a man made when he was telling the world that a woman was his—or that he hoped she was.

  Sadie reached back, grabbed his hand, and pulled his arm around her waist. She snuggled into him.

  Even as his senses checked and found no magic waiting to ambush them, he concentrated on the feel of her against him, her softness and strength.

  Karma waited in the back of the truck, near her food and water bowls. The ward on the vehicle kept anyone from seeing her. The phoenix chirruped at the sight of them, fluffed her feathers, fanned her tail, and gave every indication of approval to see him and Sadie together.

  Just how much of their situation did Karma understand?

  Would she survive alone in the San Juan Mountains?

  There were so many issues his dying would leave unresolved: his love for Sadie, her safety, Karma’s future, and his parents’ tangled past. At a minimum, he refused to die before assuring Sadie’s safety.